If they included static ads, such as an image, it may not have been a problem. However, they did video advertisements that increased the load time by 10 seconds. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX4f9zts6JM [youtube.com]

According to Edge "a less annoying way" was part of their terms with the agency from the outset. The ads were supposed to match the game aesthetic for a start. Guess the agency decided to cut corners, put up some random ad from their stock, and Sony weren't actually screening the ads for compliance.

I would claim Nintendo is, primarily due to gaming being their only revenue source. They aren't quite as willing to screw up their only source of income in order to keep their media/music/home pc/movei/websearch/whatnot wings of their company happy.

Nintendo is far from angelic, and has done nasty arrogant things in the past... but they're no Microsoft, and certainly no Sony.

It depends on what type of shenanigans you're talking about. Some would argue that what they've done is worse than anything Sony or Microsoft has done, in that it not only has annoyed gamers, it has altered the entire video gaming industry to the detriment of gamers and their competition.

Nintendo's biggest sin is that they are notoriously lawsuit-happy. They started suing just after the NES was launched and have basically never stopped. Along the way, they helped put Atari out of the video game business (forcing them to recall "unauthorized" games made for their system), they created the idea of an "exclusivity" deal, and they got mod chips and bootloaders outlawed through their lawsuits and government lobbying.

I used to work as a game reviewer and I can tell you they have always been the most paranoid of all the gaming companies. And not the kind of funny stoner kind of paranoid, I'm talking CIA/NSA/TSA/DHS kind of paranoid. And with a similar level of power, at least within their industry. They are responsible for most of the lock-ins and legal restrictions that are now standard within the industry. If not for Nintendo, anybody could write and release a game for any video game system, and anybody could run whatever code they wanted on their home game consoles, be it "officially" released or not. Nintendo saw to it that you cannot.